I am trialling limiting myself to three meat meals a week.
Last week I managed to have just 4. It’s interesting though working in Blackburn trying to find Veg takeaway is hard. I think it’s good because it will make me eat more cheaply and more healthy by bringing stuff from home.
I was thinking this morning about how interesting a social experiment it would be to make ALL people, women and men wear a burka for a day. Not only would it promote understanding and dialogue, but it would also mean a day relating to people without their looks coming into play. People living with “ugliness”, and people living with “beauty” could perhaps be treated the same as people living with “ordinariness.”
I have been struggling to write a requested piece on the global economic meltdown of doom. It is interesting, and I thought I would find it easy to write, but I haven’t. I have written pages, that I have discarded as too rant driven.
I think instead I will just write some dot points.
Bought The Cure’s 4:13 Album today. Pretty nice.
I love the lyrics of “The Perfect Boy” on it.
And her heart may be broken
A hundred times
But the hurt will never destroy
Her hope…The happy ever after girl
One day finds the perfect boy
It really is an honour and a privilege working at a place like TEAR. Yesterday and today projects officers told stories from recent trips overseas. They told stories of empowerment of poor women, transformation of communities, and people working to prevent HIV spreading into Bangladesh. Honest stories, filled with the struggles of real life, but also filled with hope. The Kingdom of God in action.
The other day I also heard a lovely story about two kids under 10 giving up pocket money, and rides at show, and doing lots of fund-raisers to buy two wells through TEAR’s Gift Catalogue. How amazing are those kids and that family? I can’t ever imagine doing that, particularly at that age.
On a different topic, I’ve also been thinking of getting some kind of professional debrief/advisor/mentor person. I am trying to do some big things at TEAR, and sometimes some outside advice and thinking would be useful. I get a bit of it now, internally and from my Dad. I am not sure if it is enough. It’s not the technical side that I need help with, that just requires hard work. Its organisational, culture and this desire to create a different kind of IT.
Does anyone know anyone, or is anyone interested in being involved?
Or is anyone just interested in listening to my plans and dreams?
I love my workplace but I get so little negative feedback it’s hard to plan. Or maybe people are just so good at giving it lovingly I don’t realise and it feeds straight into my ideas. hmmm… I think there might be some truth in that. Anyway I am rambling. Bed calls.
Goodnight Blogosphere.
Work was big today, too much vision and planing.
Training DVD’s to produce
Policies to write
Information Systems to Review
Reports to code
Reports to write
Information Management Systems to put in place
Asset registers.
And that’s just a few of the tasks I have planned.
Sigh.
I don’t understand it but within the nine months that I have been living here in Melbourne I have come to be loved by and to love some very special groups of people. It really is just wonderful, between work, church, Urban Seed, my house and Seeds Footscray I am linked to some remarkable people. I know so little of their lives but I know enough to get some idea of how wonderful they are. I am so fortunate in a world too often filed with hate, to have found numbers of people in every place I have lived that love and accept me.
Then there are the two people whom I knew from before I moved here, my sister and my friend Gem. It is comforting to have links with the past and present too. Sometimes not having to give back story is nice. I think though I need to get better with giving back story, and in listening to others stories.
I am really looking forward to the next few years in Melbourne.
I think that the act of comparing pain between people is often destructive and rarely useful. The idea that because I have suffered “more” or “less” then you that my pain, or your pain is any less real is really unhelpful. There is no monopoly on suffering. Pain should be recognised regardless of whether it is seemingly trivial, if it is real for the person then that is all that matters.
Disclaimer
I do think there is something useful in understanding that perhaps our pain/situation isn’t as bad as others and that the obstacles can be overcome.
I find doing IT support itself fairly easy. After so many years fixing problems with a few computers, managing the number at TEAR is not much more difficult.
What is difficult though is doing it well. There are really horrible power dynamics in play when people need to ask for help with something. These may include:
Problems I face when responding:
Still trying to work out some of these answers for different situations, but these questions seem to help.
A few years ago in a Bush/Blair/Howard inspired period of depression I wondered if it was still possible to have another JFK or MLK, or Ghandhi. I thought that in the days of hyper accountability/exposure of the Internet that perhaps our societies wouldn’t allow one. That they would be torn down and exposed as frauds rightly or wrongly before they had even had a chance to effect change. I thought that we had enter an era of localised mini-heros flying under the radar of mainstream society.
Obama though has proven me wrong. A classic orator, and cool calm and collected guy who just seemed to keep rising above it all. Watching his speech tonight I heard echos of Martin Luther King with:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voices could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
A reference I believe to MLK’s concept of the Moral Arc of the Universe being long but tilted towards justice. Then there were many JFK like calls to join in nation building, and improving the world. Trying to break people out of individualism and into the realm of the common good. I see good things coming to America.
I am a happy citizen of the world tonight.
My thoughts are racing.
Thoughts, words, ideas and visions,
Linkages and patterns emerge,
the veil is lifting.
Listing to Muhummad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor.
He is pretty amazing.
Also amazing is how well the trust based micro-credit systems can work, and how his Grameen Bank has managed to support women, in a place where that is not so easy.